Final Thoughts 16: Shadowrun Returns

Note: Due to the game's recent release, I'm writing this as a full fledged review, and it's much longer and more in depth than previous Final Thoughts. You can read my user review here, or read on below.

Developer: HareBrained
Schemes

Release Date: July 25,
2013

The
Seamstresses Union will have exactly what you need: A Fixer. Finding
this necessary middleman and deal-broker is key to most plans
involving shadowrunners. A good Fixer is worth the nuyen. It's their
job to have the contacts and know who's good at what. They'll put
together the team you need: magical supports, skilled street samurai
for muscle, or a novahot decker for Matrix work.

Running
the shadows is a life and death gamble. It pays to hire the best
shadowrunners you can.

Welcome to the unique world of Shadowrun. Originally
developed as a science fiction and fantasy mashup for tabletop
roleplaying, Shadowrun takes place several decades into the future
after a sudden cataclysm known as the Awakening causes elves and
dwarves to be born from long dormant genes, orks and trolls are
created from a horrific process called goblinization from those with
the unfortunate genetic disposition, dragons awaken and roam the
skies, and magic returns to the world. But Earth's technology didn't
suddenly stop advancing, and these fantasy races have created
cybernetic limbs and enhancements as well as evolving the internet
into virtual reality program called the Matrix. Mega-corporations now
rule the world in place of governments, and a special breed of
mercenary called shadowrunners are employed to carry out the tasks
that's best left in the shadows. It is a bleak, heavily
noir-influenced cyberpunk world filled with smartguns, elementals,
metahumans, virtual reality drugs, and all manner of beast and
creature.

It is the world of Shadowrun Returns.

Originally part of the first wave of highly successful
Kickstarter video game campaigns, Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman
hedged his project that fans of the tabletop game and the 16-bit
Shadowrun games on the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis would give
enough support to see a return to this interesting universe with a
traditional turn based computer role playing game. The gamble (and
timing) paid off, and Shadowrun Returns serves as a wonderful
experience for fans and a tantalizing look at this intriguing world
for newcomers.

Shadowrun's main packaged campaign is Dead Man's Switch,
an intriguing tale of a dead friend that tasks you to find his
killer. The murder mystery story plays well into the Noir dialogue
and incredibly evocative writing, but I was disappointed when it
wrapped up about halfway through the campaign to be replaced by a
hasty Save the World scenario involving an inter-dimensional
invasion. HareBrained Schemes passed over any voicework to save costs
and create more fully realized dialogue trees, and despite many of
the dialogue options leading to the same outcome, I found myself
agonizing over which of the well-written responses I wanted to give.
A few story choices stand out as well, including being hired by one
corporation to essentially kidnap an employee for another mega-corp,
and said employee is none to happy about the transfer. You can knock
him out and collect your pay, or accept his reduced offer and feel
slightly better about yourself. To a shadowrunner, it's all business.

Your customized shadowrunner can take on six different
classes: street samurai, mage, shaman, rigger, decker, and physical
adept. Street Samurais are your fighters, typically being the most
proficient with long range weapons but also capable of melee combat.
Mages and Shamans use entirely different spellcasting trees and
attributes to change the battlefield into a colorful display of
lighting balls and fire walls, and also come equipped with supportive
spells like healing and buffing armor and aim. Shamans also get the
unique ability to summon elementals onto the field using consumable
fetish items, though there's an increasing chance every turn that the
creature could turn on you before quickly disappearing. Riggers are
all about their drones, sacrificing their own action points to power
up these useful little allies that come in supportive and offensive
flavors, while physical adepts are essentially monks that specialize
in unarmed combat and their own line of spells that buff their
ability to quickly close in and deal with foes face to face. Deckers
use the unique ability to jack into the Matrix, entering them into a
Tron-like world of lights and data where you fight programs using
software of your own (basically just different spells). However,
Matrix usage is limited to each map, meaning your shadowrunner's main
ability may be completely useless as it's up to the whim of the map
builder to create nodes for you to use. During the main campaign the
Matrix is utilized at several key moments, but in each scenario it
was necessary to advance instead of a cool side option.

In addition to selecting a class you can also just
create your own as the system is entirely skill based, and if you
feel comfortable enough with stat distribution and the Shadowrun RPG
you can create your own custom class as you see fit. Want a mage that
can jack into the Matrix? Put points into intelligence, spellcasting,
willpower, and decking. You can go with as much of a jack of all
trades as you want, but with any party based game its best to select
certain roles for each of your runners to fill. After the first few
missions you get to hire your own team of shadowrunners from a
selection of pre-generated characters with pretty much every build
you could desire, from technoshamans to weaponmasters, and I felt
encourage to try out different party combinations in each new run. I
did yearn for the opportunity to fully create my own elite team of
shadowrunners, but the hiring process remains an integral part of the
gameplay experience, and the increasing costs of hire helps balance
the money you earn from completing missions.

A tactical turn based RPG lives and dies by its combat
implementation, and thankfully Shadowrun Returns lives very very
well. Anyone familiar with XCOM: Enemy Unknown will feel close to
home with every party member (sorry, runner) getting two action
points with which to move, fire, reload, cast spells, and other
numerous options at your disposal. Your field of movement is
highlighted around you, displaying how far you can go with a single
action point, and cover ranges from none to light, partial, and full.
XCOM veterans should note that cover doesn't mean near as much in
Shadowrun, and except for a few fights near the end of the game
combat was mostly a breeze once you knew what you were doing.
Unfortunately Shadowrun is very lacking in tutorials and assumes you
are already familiar with the genre and the Shadowrun universe. A
bare bones glossary and guide section is available that gives a very
rudimentary run down on combat, UI, and class abilities, but much is
left up to the player to figure out.

The skill tree is not the most attractive looking stat
sheet and resembles the horizontal square charts of the Mass Effect
series. Putting points into a skill costs progressively more "Karma
Points" (skill points which you earn in lieu of experience) while
improving damage and chance to hit, depending on the skill. They also
serve as capping the skills below it, so you have to pump points into
the Quickness attirubte before you can increase your Ranged Combat
Skill, and only then you can raise your individual gun skills. In
this case, Ranged Combat increases your chance to hit with guns,
while individual gun skills such as pistols or shotguns increases
damage and unlocks specific skills. Skills range from forgetful
(shoot twice for 2 AP) to situational (chance to hit nearby foes...and
allies) to quite useful (raise your chance to hit). Skills and spells
can cost upwards of 3AP to get off and about halfway through the
campaign you earn a third action point. Other spells like the
incredibly useful haste (+1 AP) can boost a characters action points
even further, giving you tons of options during each encounter.

Spells, guns, cyberware and armor all must be purchased
from a vendor, there's no loot collecting in the game whatsoever.
It's jarring at first but given the limited variation in loot I
hardly noticed it, and even with the progressively more expensive
shadowrunner cost to hire still had enough money to buy what I needed
(cyberware being a fairly expensive luxury). All necessary vendors
are located in the same area that serves as your home base of
operations throughout most of the storyline. While you can buy and
give consumable items like medkits and grenades to your fellow
shadowrunners, there's no other customizing allowed; you can't even
view their skill tree except on the hire screen, and in between
missions they go right back to the pool. Everyone gains more karma
points as you do, so while there's no fear of some people falling
behind, you have zero control over their skill trees or main
inventory.

Much of the game's faults lie with the limited budget
that remained a niggling annoyance throughout my experience. The
biggest is the inability to manually save the game, an understandable
deal-breaker for those with busy lives and a shock that it was
omitted in a modern game. The game autosaves during each loading
screen, which are fairly frequent, but you'll spend most of the game
locked in combat with no ability to save and quit should the need
arise. The other big issue that annoyed me was the lack of an End
Combat button such as in Fallout 1 and 2. Many times you'd enter a
map and start off in turn based combat mode, and have to complete the
entire map and go through the screen transition point, one by one,
and never leave turn based mode. Even when there were clearly no more
enemies on the screen, the game keeps you locked into moving each of
your runners by their limited action point pool, and an End Combat
button would've solved this problem instantly. It appears to have
been a design decision, presumably to make you realize that the map
could still be unsafe, but I would've much rather preferred the
Fallout method of just starting combat whenever enemies appeared.

My other big complaint in Shadowrun Returns was the
almost complete lack of side quests, resulting in an extremely linear
adventure that cripples its replayability. A few choices exist here
and there but most are superficial, and the few non-combat related,
exploratory puzzles mostly involve deciphering the clues to computer
passwords. One scene that did stand out was infiltrating a cult
through costume changes, computer hacking, and clever dialogue
options, but most areas are pure combat. Thankfully the tactical
combat is a ton of fun and depending on your party makeup you have
lots of options each turn. Spells and abilities are based off a
cooldown so firing off all your skills every round is commonplace,
and makes for some intriguing matchups.

Dead Man's Switch is only one campaign in Shadowrun
Returns, however, as it shipped with a full editor allowing users to
use any and all assets present in the Seattle campaign to create
their own adventures. Presumably this creates an unlimited amount of
entertainment within the engine, and time will tell if this becomes a
wonderfully supportive community with lots of new adventures to
choose from. HareBrained Schemes has already announced the next
official adventure, taking place in Berlin, as a full expansion pack
to the game, and if the fans supported the Kickstarter campaign well
enough to fund the dream, surely many are invested enough in the
world and game mechanics to create some memorable missions.

In my perfect world Shadowrun Returns would be a
capable, low-budget tactical RPG within an awesome role playing
universe among a year full of tactical RPG releases. But this isn't
my world and tactical RPGs are not commonplace; each one is a rare
treasure that I adore that much more for having existed. Hopefully
Shadowrun Returns will be vaulted as one of the trendsetters to a
glorious age of CPRGs,and also stand on its own as a great
representation of the Shadowrun world, fun 15 hour main campaign, and
(hopefully) dozens of hours with high quality user created content.
See you in the shadows, chummer.